Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is... (Cop Framed), 1983/2009.Chromogenic color print 16 × 20 in. Courtesy Alexander

Gray Associates, New York © 2015 Lorraine

O’Grady/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ArtSeen September 8th, 2015

STANLEY WHITNEY and LORRAINE O’GRADYby Phillip Griffith

THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM | JULY 16 – OCTOBER 25, 2015

Two shows on view at the Studio Museum of Harlem dramatize the resistance of art to fixity andstability, through the abstract paintings in Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange and what mighttoday be termed the “socially-engaged” photographs in Lorraine O’Grady: Art Is…. These paintingsand photographs draw the viewer into visual spaces of shifting compositional elements, furtivelymoving the eye from one corner of the painting to the other, or from one photograph to the next.Poet and cultural critic Fred Moten gives the term “fugitivity” to this kind of movement in art byblack poets, musicians, and artists—that is, the kind of movement that creates a third, unauthorizedspace of meaning in the work.

Whitney’s canvases are composed of rows of vibrant(and vibrating) color squares separated by horizontalbands of color. Because Whitney invariably paints fromthe top left of the canvas to the bottom right, row byrow, the paintings have a feeling of inevitability. Despitethis, he lets color beckon color as he moves through thesquare panels, and so, each painting also surprises.Some color squares are smooth and opaque; some aretranslucent, or show underpainting, drips, andscratches. In one of the largest paintings, named MyName is Peaches (2015) after a lyric from Nina Simone,an orange square at the center of the canvas reveals, inits warm opacity, little trace of Whitney’s brush. But theblue squares in this painting reveal more: the length and patterning of Whitney’s brushwork, a bit ofwhite canvas beneath the light blue square in the top left corner. The irregularity of such aregularized compositional practice gives special meaning—Moten’s “fugitivity”—to the feeling ofimprovisational movement the color squares evince when taken as an ensemble.

Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2014. Black gouache onFabriano paper, 11 × 15 inches. Courtesy the artist andTeam Gallery, inc., New York.

Whitney’s practice finds its own third space between the influences of Minimalism and of AbstractExpressionism. The grid is present, but as a compositional constraint more than as a rigid form—or, to put it differently, as a gridded field or a blank page of sheet music, on which the colors slide inrows, in different tones and shades. Whitney’s system of painting is more subjective than thatassociated with the Minimalist grid, or Donald Judd’s compositions and sculpture, and even moreimprovisational than a grid such as Mondrian’s jazz-inflected Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942 – 43). An untitled series of small, black-and-white gouache paintings underscores the irregularity ofWhitney’s geometry. In these paintings, divested of their colors, the grid becomes apparent, but so,too, do its moments of collapse as squares fall in on themselves to become triangles.

Whitney gives particular attention to his titles, drawing his paintings closer to poetry. The title of theshow, Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, explicitly refers to a line by the poet Rainer Maria Rilkethat invokes the color orange (and Whitney borrows the line for the title of a smaller canvas in theexhibit’s side gallery, too). The color orange holds a privileged place in the history of encountersbetween poetry and painting. Frank O’Hara wrote Why I Am Not a Painter about why he was notpainting an orange canvas, and Paul Éluard’s Surrealist masterpiece, The Earth is Blue Like anOrange, makes the world quiver with chromatic possibility with one tantalizing, synesthetic simile.Whitney’s exhibit stakes out its own shifting ground in this history.

The surface of Dance the Orange is largely orange, butcomposed of a patchwork of different hues. From theright side of the frame creeps a column of coolersquares, a deep blue accompanied above by a gray andlighter blue square. Like the grid, the surface and theframe of the painting are unstable, as well. Whilethreatening the dance of orange, the blues also throw itinto relief. Even the color orange, which takes on amonolithic power in this show each time it recurs on acanvas, never returns as the same hue. And the colorsquares seem to slide, inexorably, in and out of theframe of the canvas before our eyes.

In a recent conversation with painter David Reed in Bomb, Whitney compares his painting to

music;1 Moten writes similarly of his prosody. In an interview at the end of the 2010 collection B.Jenkins, the poet discusses “fugitivity.” He declares, “I want to write poems that recognizablyinhabit, but in some kind of underground or fugitive way, the space between the laws of music and

the laws of meaning.”2 Moten’s intellectual investments lie partly in exploring the “middle passages”that black art takes through the 20th century’s avant-garde history. Like meaning in Moten’s poetry,Whitney’s grid trembles between the “laws of music and the laws of meaning.” And, not surprisingly,like Whitney’s paintings, Moten’s recent poems in the 2014 National Book Award-nominated TheFeel Trio capture jazz-like improvisation, packed into regimented squares of justified prose blocks.

Stanley Whitney, My Name is Peaches, 2015. Oil onlinen, 96 × 96 inches. Courtesy the artist and Team

Gallery, inc., New York.

Lorraine O’Grady’s conceptual and performance-based art practice eschews Whitney’s painterlyabstraction, but still, fugitive moments recur in her photographs of 1983’s Art Is… performance, onview in the downstairs galleries of the museum. Documenting the participation of O’Grady and atroupe of dancers in the 1983 African-American day parade along Adam Clayton Powell Jr.Boulevard in Harlem, the selection of photographs includes forty images from Art Is…, taken bybystanders and later collected by O’Grady.

For the parade, O’Grady outfitted a parade float with alarge golden picture frame and banner reading “ArtIs…,” and tasked dancers with carrying wooden framesto allow bystanders and participants to “frame” scenesof the parade. O’Grady’s images turn the geometry of therectangular frame into puns: the frames carried by theperformers frame moments of experience as art worksbut also turn the power of the police patrolling the eventagainst the officers. In such images as Art Is… (CopFramed), the police are “framed,” if not for a crime thanat least as subject to the power of the performance. InArt Is… (Cop Eyeing Young Man) whatever suspicionthe officer may harbor for the young black man he“eyes” returns to him, caught as he is in the corner of aframe by one of the dancers. Given the current reality ofthe deaths of so many black and brown men, women,and children at the hands of the police, this image might read ominously, but this is as ominous asthe images in this series get.

In others, the tone is joyful and reflexive, as in Art Is… (Girl Pointing) in which a young womanpoints exuberantly out of her frame and at the photographer. Other images, such as Art Is… (CrossStreet), recall the progression of Whitney’s squares across his canvases as the large rectangularframe on the parade float captures images within the frame of the photographic image.

The frames holding O’Grady’s photographs, the frame of the photographic image itself, and theframes paraded by O’Grady’s dancers create a shifting geometry in this exhibit that echoes themovement in Whitney’s paintings upstairs. O’Grady’s images pun on “fugitivity” in their topsy-turvydepiction of the police but also highlight the fleeting nature of fugitive moments of art andexperience. Like O’Grady’s carnivalesque intervention, Whitney’s colors resist compositionalconstraint to challenge fixed geometry with the subjective life of color.